What In Return?
by klinneah
Summary: "You of all people ought to recognize this place. It has to have appeared in a dozen half-baked half-remembered dreams."
1. Chapter 1

She was never just God - she was the goddamned _Architect_.

The power to create labyrinths, to build the _couldn'ts_, the _aren'ts_, and the _never-wills_, to bend not just steel and glass but the very fabric of reality to her whimsy - no _god_ could hold a candle to what she did for a _living_.

True, she had a hard time sleeping most nights in her shithole of an apartment that let in the most ungodly drafts, and who could forget the mess she'd made of the Latvian government when something had gone wrong in the Point Man department and they'd botched the job more horribly than anyone could have forseen. That wasn't her fault, though; _her_ responsibility had been the bending-reality-to-her-fancy part, which she'd pulled off beautifully. It had been her best work.

She wonders now whether Miles would have been proud.

The three figures in the apartment remain motionless, haphazardly draped over armchairs and couches, where they had lain since she'd brought them.

The man sitting in a kitchen chair near the bathtub shifts in his sleep and murmers something, and she frowns. She glances into the bedroom as if to confirm that the hostage there is still alive (he is), then returns her attention to the man in the chair. His skin is so pale, if it weren't for the soft movement of his chest she might think he was dead.

As he blinks himself awake he becomes aware of the world one sense at a time. Smell - cinnamon, maybe, and carpet so old it ought to be rotting to pieces. Touch - the air is cold, the chair is hard, and he hasn't had a change of clothes in many, many hours if not days (he can tell because his arms prickle with the lack of fresh clothing). His shoulders are cramped. Sight - only the window, to his right, that looks at an empty street, a living room to his left carpeted with the most disgusting yellow shag he's ever seen, and a writing desk built into the wall in front of him. Sound - nothing, no neighbors upstairs or down, no refrigerator humming, no AC unit rattling. The silence presses in around him, making him far more uncomfortable than one really ought to be when one has been forcibly relocated to the most run-down apartment in the nation and possibly the world, confined to a small chair, and deprived of company.

Worn silk rubs at his wrists whenever he moves, and he can't lean forward far enough to see whether his ankles are similarly restrained (but a little wiggling confirms that they are). Still no sounds, not even people outside the apartment building. The back of his neck prickles with sweat (the sun is shining directly into his eyes), and suddenly he feels as though he is not alone.

"Having fun?" asks a sickly-sweet voice from somewhere close behind him. A coldness settles into his stomach and his hair stands on end. It can't be.

But of course, it is.

"I was worried you were lonely," says the voice on the back of his neck, and Ariadne steps around the chair, settles onto the writing desk with a crooked smile. "I thought you might miss me. Did you, Arthur?"

He ignores the question. "What is this?"

She tsks. "Pity, Arthur dear, you of all people ought to recognize this place. It has to have appeared in a dozen half-baked half-remembered dreams."

Now that she's drawn his attention to the details (it's always the details) the place does indeed tug at his memory like a forgotten lyric or something crucial overlooked. His gaze is drawn to the carpet - the ugliest yellow shag he's ever laid eyes on - and it triggers another memory of another half-remembered dream, one in which everything had gone wrong because Nash had fucked up the damn _carpet_...

"Is this your place now," he murmurs, eyebrows raised, glances around in renewed curiosity. This place _has_ to be at least a _million_ years old. She nods.

"Lovely, isn't it?"

"Why here, Ari?" She flinches at the pet name. "Why here, of all places?"

"Arthur? Arthur is that you?" calls a voice that, given the circumstances, is sweet, sweet music to his ears. "Thank the bloody Lord, I was beginning to-"

"Shut the hell up, Eames," she barks. For the first time Arthur notices she is holding his pistol. She's been clicking the safety on and off since Eames first piped up from somewhere out of sight, and now she aims it at the floorboards and pulls the trigger with a bang.

Eames shuts up.

**Alright, so here's something a little bit different. Still well within my comfort zone - I don't really write fluff, although I devour it like it's ambrosia. Thanks for reading, and remember, reviews feed the empty plot! You have no idea how much each and every email means to me.**


	2. Chapter 2

Arthur tries a different tack. "Ari...what are we doing here?"

Her face hardens. "You haven't guessed it yet?"

"I don't _know_, Ari. I don't _know_."

She laughs coldly. "You, of _all_ people. No vague suspicions, no...creeping doubts...no ideas? Nothing?"

He stares, trying to keep the utter confusion out of his expression. "Nothing," he says flatly, trying to read her face, which remains unreadable.

"Fine then," she says with a scowl. "_You_," she waves Arthur's gun around vaguely to indicate a wider audience, "destroyed me."

"What are you-"

"_You ruined me!_" she shrieks, leaping to her feet and beginning to pace, trembling wildly and waving her hands. "_Lured_ me away from my studies to join you in your world of dreams! _Dragged_ me across continents when somebody fucked up! _Ruined_ any chance I had at legitimate work!" She pants for breath, eyes glittering with hatred. "You took away everything that ever mattered to me - a home, a degree, a career...and what did you give me in return?" She leaned in close to whisper, but he knows the script. He says the words before she can choke them out.

"A nightmare."

Her face twists, briefly, before settling back into the calm, collected rage that has been her default since he woke up.

"Do you think I haven't been living that nightmare too?"

Again, silence. Ariadne studies him, pretending to be disdainful, and he can see the violent half-sane insanity _boiling_ in her eyes that is more true that anything he can tell her about the difference between dreams and reality.

_That_, the half-sane insanity, is what causes the frightened tremble in his voice as he asks "Ariadne..." _Ari..._ "Where's Dom?"

Suddenly she looks away, almost apologetic. "He's dead."

"Did..." his throat is very dry and he's having a hard time breathing- "you..."

She stares at him as though she had suddenly remembered that he was very, very stupid, then studies the dirty window. _Of course, _she's saying. _Who else?_

The muggy weather is beginning to take its toll; beads of sweat roll down his forehead and his button-up is sticking to his skin. He's itchy, restless (_what a surprise_), and he just wants to get away from this nightmare that somebody's decided to toss him. After a moment he thinks that maybe it's only the stress of this whole ordeal that's finally getting to his head.

He just wants to know _what the fuck is going on, _so he asks.

"What's going to happen now?"

The click of her heels on the floor slows, stops, then resumes; as she walks past him he gets a whiff of lavender. She glares. Relents.

"I don't know yet," she says, fiddling with the trigger on the pistol; but she won't pull it. Not yet.

He tugs experimentally on the knot under his fingers, and he feels a slight give. Schooling his face, watching hers, he picks at it carefully while listening to her click the safety _on off on off on off on off..._

Ariadne's gaze bores into his eyes. She'd noticed. "You can't get away," she says, dully, as though she had repeated it to herself until she believed it. _He can't get away. He can't get away. He can't get away._

He laughs, hard and dry. It hurts. "Who's going to stop me?" A crazy, suicidal thing to ask, but it _exhilarates_ him in a way that rushes into his blood and assures him that _this is no dream, this is real, and if you fuck this up there's no second chance._

This is real, and reality is more frightening and exhilarating than even the most verisimilar dream.

Then it hits him that this is all out of control, while he feels as though he is standing outside of it, looking in with cool indifference instead of suffering through the ordeal himself. The knot slips and slides, cool and hard under his numb fingertips, doesn't actually seem to be unraveling but he thinks it might be.

Then it hits him that she's standing dangerously close, not close enough to kiss but close enough to touch, pressing the muzzle of the gun to his chest with her finger on the trigger, eyes glittering with hatred and..._something else_...

_Then_ it hits him that's he's about to die.

It's rather calming. Terrifying.

Her hands are steady as she looks him in the eyes. Her voice is steady as she whispers the only sane words he'll hear -

"I loved you."

- and pulls the trigger.

_I loved you too._

__**Thank you so much, everyone, for all the love and support you have given me, as I've now completed my second story! I won't be writing anything new for a while, since I'm officially a college student as of Wednesday, but keep an eye out because I _am_ working on a few things, they just won't be uploaded as quickly or as often. Thanks again, guys, you have no idea what it means for me to check my email and see so much support, even if it's just a +fav.  
><strong>


End file.
